Amazon and Washington Post proprietor Jeff Bezos, centre, attending Donald Trump’s inauguration as a “special guest.”
February 27, 2025
A CRTC filing by Honest Reporting Canada and the Canadian Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs has garnered a front page opinion column in the National Post suggesting that the CBC has demonstrated a systemic anti-Israel bias in its news reporting on Gaza over the last 17 months.
Honest Reporting is a media watchdog devoted to challenging media coverage it considers anti-semitic or biased against Israel.
Honest Reporting and the CIJA filed their allegations as an intervention on the CBC’s routine application to the CRTC to authorize a radio antenna replacement, an evident attempt to jump the queue of backlogged regulatory matters in Ottawa.
The CBC pointed this out to the Commission and suggested the matter ought first to go to the CBC Ombudsperson who regularly adjudicates complaints about coverage and the newsroom’s adherence to the CBC’s Editorial Code.
The CBC didn’t respond to the specifics of the complaint which include the CBC relying on Gaza news reports filed by freelance journalists whose independence is allegedly compromised in the extreme.
The CBC Ombud posts online its responses to a steady flow of audience complaints about its coverage and the CBC’s reporting on Gaza is a frequent topic (you will find nothing remotely comparable to the frequency and granularity of journalism accountability in the private news media).
In each post, the Ombud reviews the facts of alleged news bias or bad journalism, the CBC’s management response, and renders judgment on how the online, TV or radio news coverage lives up to the CBC’s standards.
One of the key sections of that Code describing the CBC newsroom’s curatorial standards is this one:
On issues of controversy, we ensure that divergent views are reflected respectfully, taking into account their relevance to the debate and how widely held these views are. We also ensure that they are represented over a reasonable period of time.
Here’s a sampling of Ombud reviews of complaints which, for the sake of brevity only, I have designated as “Pro-Israel” or “Pro-Palestine” (acknowledging that the terms are clunky and the complainants might prefer a different designation).
Combatants in the hospital basement
A pro-Palestine complainant identified an online CBC report in which a medical doctor in Gaza was mistranslated as saying there were Hamas combatants in the hospital basement when in fact he said there were Israeli soldiers in the basement.
CBC corrected the news reporting error upon being alerted by the Agence France journalist who filed the initial report, but failed to draw attention to the correction for two weeks, the delay being contrary to its own Editorial Code.
CBC management said the delay in posting a correction was human error, expressed regret, and promised to do better. The complainant persisted, but the Ombud rejected any attempt to name and shame individual employees.
The “Hamas-run” Gaza Health Ministry
A pro-Palestinian complainant was of the opinion that the CBC was “cheerleading genocide by echoing and amplifying the propaganda points of the aggressor [Israel].”
Specifically, the complaint objected to phrases used by the CBC news reporter: “Hamas-run Health Ministry” and “the Israel-Hamas conflict.”
With respect to the Health Ministry, the complainant argued that the phrase “Hamas-run” is not a neutral descriptor but meant to discredit the Gaza Health Ministry and the credibility of its death-tolls by associating it with terrorist activity, going on to argue that Hamas’ terrorist actions have been “time-limited” to the October 7th massacre. The complainant claimed there is “zero evidence” that Hamas controls the Health Ministry.
The Ombud dodged the claim that there is no evidence that Hamas, which has governed Gaza since winning the 2007 elections, is in control of the Health Ministry or has the power to influence reporting of the death count.
The Ombud said that “Hamas-run” is factually accurate and might be relevant to particular stories. However he acknowledged that perhaps the repetitive use of the Hamas connection at all times was unnecessary and therefore unfair (presumably to the Health Ministry).
Platforming calls for genocide
A pro-Israel complainant objected to a CBC headline and story asking “what does ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ mean?”
The complaint suggested that since the phrase is an unambiguous call for the expulsion or murder of all Jews in the region, it was anti-semitic to provide a news platform to justify or sanitize the use of the phrase.
The Ombud said that ignorance about the phrase’s genocidal intent or implications was newsworthy in of itself, but that a better headline would have identified that the article was about how Palestinian supporters didn’t acknowledge or just disagreed with those implications.
Israeli ‘retaliation” or military operations?
A pro-Israel complainant objected to a CBC radio show that described Israeli Defence Force as attacking a Palestinian refugee camp without providing the context of the operational task, i.e. its mission was to root out Hamas terrorists, not retaliate against civilians.
The Ombud said that news services must curate and make judgment calls about how much context is acknowledged through each part of the news narrative and that CBC’s news coverage on the Gaza conflict ought to be judged as a body of work, i.e. the context provided across several news reports.
Failing to challenge guest point of views
A pro-Israel complainant objected to a radio interview with a guest who presented a pro-Palestinian view and made some strident comments, including accusing Israel of a “potential genocide” which the host did not challenge and appeared to accept.
The Ombud said that judging the CBC’s balance of coverage, especially where diversity of opinion is concerned, is measured in the long run “over a reasonable period of time:
“The concept of providing balanced coverage over a reasonable period of time allows for deeper discussions in the moment without forcing a reflexive “he said/she said” moment into every program.
“At the same time, there needs to be a recognition from [the complainant] and other listeners: a single report, or a single radio interview, is not meant to be interpreted as “CBC’s take” on an issue. When there is a story like this one that has lots of coverage, accept that there will be many different takes. An individual story might have such a narrow frame that it feels like bias. But over time, chances are that you’ll be exposed to a variety of ideas that allow you to form whatever conclusion you like about the issue at hand. And no matter how good a job CBC does, remember that it does not have a monopoly on wisdom or smart sources; I encourage you to get information from a variety of news providers.”
The Ombud said (as in other reviews) that the CBC ought to do a better job, especially after hosting a point-of-view guest, to refer the audience to the CBC’s other commentators or news coverage.
As to the reporter’s failure to challenge strident opinion —-she agreeably replied “right” immediately following the guest’s allegation of genocide—- the Ombud said he didn’t think it was intentional but was badly phrased.
Whose missile?
This was a complaint by Honest Reporting that a news report on a horribly maimed Gazan child attributed her injuries to an IDF missile when the origin of the rocket attack was only alleged by her family, not proven by any other evidence (the added context being the well known misreporting of the origin of a missile strike in October 2023).
A second complaint was that a CBC journalist had tweeted an accusation that the IDF arbitrarily arrested a Palestinian West Bank activist when in fact she was charged with inciting terrorism through some blood-curdling posts to social media.
The Ombud agreed that it was an error for the CBC National newscast not to clarify that the allegation of IDF responsibility for the missile was an unproven allegation by the victim’s family, although noting that in the circumstances of that news cycle it was more likely to have been an IDF missile rather than a Hamas misfire.
The Ombud said a better and more contextualized edit of the news narrative would have been to report that the missile hit during the same time period as IDF missile activity in the area. The Ombud said that ultimately the reporting error, in the context of the entire TV report, didn’t meet the Editorial Code threshold of being “significant” enough to warrant a televised correction.
As for the CBC journalist’s social media post, the Ombud appeared to agree with the complainant and, although the journalist had left the CBC since the incident, advised CBC journalists to be very cautious when posting on social media and to follow the broadcaster’s advice that its journalists should be as disciplined on personal accounts as they would be writing a post for the CBC.
***
I recommend a recent Associated Press news report on Jeff Bezos instructing the Opinion Page Editor at his Washington Post to ban commentary that doesn’t conform to the rubric of “supporting personal liberties and free markets.” The timing of the move is likely a genuflection to Donald Trump.
The AP news article catalogues the recent run of similar interventions by Bezos: killing a newsroom endorsement of Kamala Harris, spiking an editorial cartoon mocking the Tech Bros’ grovelling before the Trump administration, etc.
It’s not a novel thing that news proprietors seek to put their ideological stamp on their publications. It’s always a question of how brazen or how manipulative, or whether chief editors are willing proxies in attempting to bend news coverage by journalists. The once-owner of the National Post, the disgraced and convicted Conrad Black, expressed it thus: “I think I ought to be able to open up my own newspaper in the morning without being severely aggravated.”
As the billionaire owner of Amazon, with its finger in so many Big Tech pies, Bezos’ knee-bending to Trump is driven by fear and favour to his business interests. The next red-line to cross or respect will be interference with the Post’s legendary political reporting.
There may (or may not) be lessons to be taken for Canada and our media policy on government aid to news journalism.
As I opined elsewhere, it would be disingenuous to dismiss fears that the Canadian QCJO program unlocking salary subsidies, reader tax credits, and charitable donations to news journalism is free of at least a hypothetical risk to the independence of the free press. Less hypothetically, imagine how a Donald Trump imitator might manipulate news outlets by throttling back and forth with those government levers.
But the point to consider is this: in a liberal democracy such as Canada, how do we assess the level of risk in providing government aid to independent journalism, stacked up against the risk of a great deal less independent journalism because news outlets increasingly go out of business or scale back reporting to match their diminished advertising revenue?
And how have those competing risks played out in the last five years? Is there any discernible change in news reporting and curation?
The other point to consider is this: as Bezos’ cringing before Trump demonstrates, politicians seeking to intimidate the free press into a supine posture as part of a strategy to destroy liberal democracy will find a way to do it. There are no government subsidies to media in the US, yet look at the result.
***
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